All About Lulu (21 page)

April 23, 1990

Dear Will,

It doesn’t feel like spring in Seattle, doesn’t smell like lilacs or rosebuds, although my days do seem longer. I’m not in love with Dan—at least not the crocus and nightingale kind of love, but maybe a different kind. I was never really big on spring, anyway. We’re autumn people, you and I. I’m not sure if Seattle is the center of the universe, or the bottom of the vortex. Dan just joined a different band—one you may have heard of. He seems to think Seattle’s the center. It’s like our Summer of Love, he says. I fucking hope not. To be honest I don’t really care if it’s the center or the bottom, it’s the middle I’m afraid of, and if my life doesn’t begin soon, I fear I’ll wind up there.

Yet, I can’t seem to get started. What’s holding me back? Who am I?

What am I afraid of ? Why do I feel that I’m all these different things to all these different people, and yet at the end of the day I feel I’m nobody, nothing.

Is it because we spend every night in the same
fi
ve taverns, talking, talking, talking? Because we wear our angst like badges? Because we regret things we haven’t even done yet? Because we’re afraid of building a new world out of the same crappy materials? It’s not fair of me to say “we,” because Dan is actually doing something, or believes he is, which may or may not amount to the same thing.

This is really about me, whoever that is.

Enough about whoever I am. How are you? Dad says he doesn’t hear much from you. He talks in a way he didn’t used to. I’m proud of him, and scared for him, and trying to forgive him for his short-comings. We should all forgive each other, don’t you think? I understand him now more than I used to, maybe. And I understand that people deal with their shit in their own way.

Dan is on tour for
fi
ve weeks and will be in L.A. the second week of May. I told him he should call you. He likes you, though you got off to a rough start. I know you probably think he’s stupid, but really he’s just honest. There’s a difference.

I do miss you, Will, I hope you believe that, and again I’m sorry about the night in Cabazon. I was drunk, but also I was crazy for a number of reasons, which someday maybe I can explain, or begin to. I’m proud of you, William Miller, you’re one of the smartest people I know. Please say hello to Troy. I’ll try to write again soon.

Love,

Lulu

Dan called the second week of May, from the Sky Bar, no less, where he was drinking with an A&R guy from Geffen. I was not in the least surprised to learn that Dan was doing killer. Lulu was also doing killer, in Dan’s estimation. The Chateau Marmont, the band, the tour, life in Seattle, they were all killer. I told him I might show up at the Whiskey, where his band was headlining.

“That would be killer,” he said.

He put me on the list. I didn’t go. I think I watched
Alf
instead, or maybe
The Wizard of Ass
.

Hume: An Overview
By Will Miller

(with a ton of help from Albert Hakim)

David Hume was born in Edinburgh in 1711 (arguably the effect of his mother’s pregnancy). He formed syllables, learned to walk, talk, dress himself, say please and thank you, mastered his changing voice, and matriculated. His family wanted him to be a lawyer. He tried halfheartedly, gave up, and began a program of “private study” in literature and philosophy.

Impressions and Ideas

Hume believed that experience provides the
fi
rst access to knowledge. Whatever came to us via direct experience, Hume called “perception.” He divided perceptions into two categories: “impressions” and “ideas.” Impressions were the immediate data of experience: sensations, passions, emotions. Ideas were “faint copies,” mere abstractions of our impressions.

Hume said: “Every simple idea has a simple impression which resembles it.” A sensation, an emotion, a direct and immediate response. Not so with complex ideas, which were extrapolations. If, therefore, impressions are the direct consequence of experience, they are the main vehicle for our knowledge of objects. The more closely our ideas correspond to our impressions, the more reliable they are.

On the Supposed Necessity of Causality

Hume noted that there was no correlating sensation for the idea of cause and effect. We merely associated in our minds those objects that are constantly associated outside them, as we merely associated
fl
ame with heat, and without further ceremony we call one cause and the other effect.

Since there was no impression for cause, since we could not “know it,” only “believe it,” to believe in effect was little more than a leap of faith.

On the Self, and God

Hume observed that there is no sensation, no single experience in which the unity of the self is perceived. The self is merely a collection of qualities, perceptions, conjunctions, and beliefs: “When I turn my re
fl
ection on ‘myself,’ I can never perceive this ‘self’ without some one or more perceptions; nor can I ever perceive anything but the perceptions.”

As for God, he was just another cause, the ultimate cause, another perceptual conglomeration that had no speci
fi
c corollary in the realm of sensations. God wasn’t demonstrable.

Hume died in Edinburgh in 1776.

Nice job, Will! Clearly stated. You seem to have a firm grasp on Hume’s brand of skepticism. Interestingly, toward the end of his life, Hume granted God a few concessions.

—G.S.

In June of 1990, two weeks shy of the twins’ high school graduation, I got a call from Big Bill. He said he was driving out to Lucerne Valley to some old turkey ranch on the following Saturday and wanted to know if I’d like to come along. I wanted to know why. He didn’t know why, exactly. He thought it might be fun. I doubted it, but I didn’t tell him so.

My
fi
rst thought was that Big Bill, under mounting
fi
nancial pressure and the further duress of a severe identity crisis, was about to do something rash—that he was contemplating or possibly even intent upon buying a turkey ranch in the middle of the Mojave, and that it was my duty and responsibility to persuade him at all costs against undertaking such an enterprise.

Things were worse than I thought. Big Bill was driving a minivan.

It was the color of Carlo Rossi sangria, the only alcoholic beverage I can remember Big Bill condescending to drink upon occasion, usually with ice cubes and a splash of 7Up, frequently gulped in concert with a beef burrito the size of a football.

The van still smelled of new vinyl. Even in his present state of shrunkenness, Big Bill looked hulking and ridiculous at the wheel.

“Where did this come from?” I said, dumping my book bag between the seats and settling in.

“Willow bought it up north,” he said.

“How’s the mileage?”

“So far so good. Better than the old Dodge.”

Through Hollywood and Sherman Oaks and Burbank we engaged in small talk. News from the gym (where Big Bill was still relegated to spectating), some talk about baseball, and a little talk about my up-coming
fi
nals—but not much. I couldn’t see discussing Spinoza with Big Bill any more than I could see discussing the French Enlightenment with Yogi Bear. Thus, we opted for the greener pastures of chit-chat until, somewhere around Newhall, Big Bill switched gears.

“Lot of changes coming, Will. Lot of changes. Especially for your brothers. Have you talked to them lately?”

“Not like
lately
lately, a couple months.”

“Well, Ross is getting an apartment with that friend of his, the one with the red leather pants, Regis, Regan, Reagan, you know the one. He’s lined Ross—er, uh, I mean
Alistair
up with a job selling women’s shoes downtown somewhere, one of the department stores.

Apparently the commissions are pretty good.”

“That’s cool,” I said.

“Of course, he’ll have to stop dressing like Ronald McDonald,”

said Big Bill. “And comb that hair of his. I can’t even light a match in that upstairs bathroom anymore. I’m afraid I’ll blow up the house with all those hairspray fumes.”

I couldn’t help but grin. Big Bill grinned back.

“He’s something else, isn’t he? He and Lulu. Every time you turn around there’s something new. A cape, a nose ring, a crazy haircut.

Have you seen the T-shirts he’s wearing lately? They hang like ribbons on him. But darnit, I’ve got a good feeling about him. He’s going to grow into himself one of these days. It’s his brother I’m worried about.”

“Doug?”

“Of course, Doug. I never worried about you, Will. Never had to.

Somehow, I always knew you’d be okay.”

I felt a twinge of resentment.

“You’re made of strong stuff,” he pursued. “Your mother was made of strong stuff, you know. She was a
fi
ghter. You’ve got her determination.”

“Hopefully not her endurance,” I said.

“You’d have made a hell of a bodybuilder, you know that? All that determination and compact musculature.”

“Thanks, but no thanks.”

“Oh well. To each his own, I guess. You’ll
fi
nd a way to use it.

There’s a big market for determination.”

Whatever gave Big Bill the idea that I was strong and determined?

Was it my tireless and unyielding pursuit of
…
nothing? Why were people forever overestimating me? I almost said something to that effect, but Big Bill, in his silence, had begun to furrow his brow, like something was weighing upon him.

“What’s wrong?” I said.

“Doug’s got it in his head to join the air force.” He shook his head and frowned. “I should have seen this coming. He watched that darn
Top Gun
every day for two years.”

“Why don’t you stop him?”

“There’s no talking him out of it.”

“You could say no.”

“He’s eighteen,” observed Big Bill. “And even if he weren’t, I can’t see the advantage of forbidding things. Everybody has a will of their own, everybody makes the same mistakes in different ways. You can’t stand in anyone’s way.”

“Well, at least they’ll pay his way through college, right? It’s not like he’ll be marching off to war. He’ll be vacuuming cockpits in Arkansas, or something.”

“I suppose you’re right. But something about it still troubles me.”

We rolled down Soledad Pass and into the high desert. I could smell deep-fried fat on the desert wind. Victorville was no longer a quaint desert outpost, it was a sprawl of low-density development, gray modular homes, fast food joints, gas stations.

“It wasn’t always like this,” observed Big Bill. “Heck, I remember when there was nothing here. It’s sad.” Indeed, he was wistful for a moment, but then he wrinkled his nose a little. “You hungry?”

“No.”

“Me neither.”

The development spread through Hesperia into Apple Valley, an undeterred rash of deli-marts and affordable housing. It didn’t matter that the landscape was Venutian, that there wasn’t a museum for a hundred miles. There existed no place too inhospitable for a Gulf station or an Arby’s. Build it and they will come. Lucerne Valley would be next, maybe a year, maybe
fi
ve, but eventually Colonel Sanders would come knocking.

By the time Big Bill and I hit Highway 247, we’d
fi
nally left the development behind us, and soon there existed hardly a trace of anything at all—an occasional homestead, a crooked row of fence posts, a blown-out retread.

Big Bill guided us off the highway and down a dirt road that headed east into a wasteland of greasewood and sand.

“Maybe we’ll run into Moses out here,” I said, but I don’t think Big Bill got the joke.

The road got worse the farther we bumped along. Two or three miles in, Big Bill veered off down a second unmarked dirt road, this one heading southeast into obscurity. Here and there a rusty barrel or an engine block jutted out of the earth. After a quarter mile, the road ended abruptly in a pile of railroad ties. Big Bill stopped the van and killed the motor. He unbuckled his seat belt and climbed out of the car. I got out, too. We trudged a ways out into the desert, stopped in our tracks, and just stood there. The air was dry and heavy with the smell of sage.

“Well,” said Big Bill. “Here we are.”

Here: scorched earth as far as the eye could see, a few crumbling foundations, a giant ditch with a bunch of old tires piled up in it.

“Where are the turkeys?” I said.

“Oh, they’re long gone. Haven’t been any turkeys here for at least
fi
fty years, I’d guess.”

It wasn’t hard to believe. In fact, it was somewhat more dif
fi
cult to comprehend why there were ever turkeys here in the
fi
rst place, why there was ever anything in this place.

“Why are we here?” I said.

Big Bill didn’t answer right off. I wasn’t even sure he heard me. He stood perfectly still in a sort of reverie. “I dreamed it,” he said.

“Dreamed what?”

“Dreamed this place.” Big Bill squatted down and sifted some sand through his
fi
ngers like he was panning for gold. When all the sand had slipped through, he scooped up another handful and began sifting again, this time without looking.

“Your mother wanted to buy this land. She wanted to start a commune before it was too late.”

“Too late for what?”

“Too late for such a thing to work.” All my father’s sifting had yielded a tiny rusting hinge. He turned the relic over in his hand before lobbing it back out into the sand. “It was already too late by the Summer of Love,” he said. “Haight-Ashbury was nothing.

Squatters, dope
fi
ends, dropouts. The dream was over. All that
fl
ower power smelled rotten by the Summer of Love. There was just enough time for the ad stooges and the soda companies to cash in on it. Your mother wanted to start something out here, preserve something, away from all that. She wrote a charter, drew up plans. Housing. Irrigation. A Garden of Eden right here in the Mojave.” Absently, Big Bill drew shapes in the sand with his index
fi
nger. “Humph,” he said, scratching them out. “By God, we almost did it.”

“And what? The Manson Family beat you to the punch?”

I don’t think Big Bill heard me. He was far away—in 1967, I guess. He surveyed the landscape, west from the San Bernardino Mountains, north across the dusty
fl
ats, and east to the Bullions.

Finally his eyes settled on the ditch with the pile of tires. “That used to be an irrigation pond,” he said.

“So, what happened?”

“It dried up.”

“No, with the commune, what happened?”

“You happened,” he said, sifting some more sand through his
fi
ngers. “Your mother got pregnant. That changed her thinking. She
fi
nished school. We moved to Santa Monica.” He sounded a little disappointed by it all. He tossed his handful of sand out into the void before he’d
fi
nished sifting it. “I dreamed it all again last week,”

he said.